Japan Trip Day 1 - 2010-07-04

Photos from this day.

Our trip over to Japan was fairly uneventful. As expected, the flight was quite long, but we were happy to find that we had personal video monitors at each seat. I'd never been on a plane like that, so it was pretty exciting and it made the time pass much quicker.

We ended up watching two movies, How to Train Your Dragon (or something like that), and Clash of the Titans. The former was kind of cute but some spots were really annoying. I particularly disliked the names of the characters and the voice actors they chose for some of the parts. The story wasn't bad though. Clash of the Titans was just awful, it looked like it was done in the early 90's, but it has come out fairly recently. We also watched as many episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender as possible- until Kellian's computer battery died (thanks Amy for lending us the DVDs!).

When we arrived in Tokyo, we had about an hour and a half to make our connection, which was plenty of time. We had to go through customs and collect our bags, then re-check them. It took us a bit of wandering to figure out where we needed to go to check our bags. A nice employee noticed that we were confused and sent us in the right direction.

The flight from Tokyo to Osaka was pretty short, we slept through most of it. When we arrived in Osaka, we had to figure out how we were going to make our way to Kyoto. Fortunately, there was a clearly labelled bus that we were able to get tickets for. The bus only took about 50 minutes to get us to Kyoto.
Once we got to Kyoto, we had to take a cab to our hotel which was about 10 minutes away. The cab driver didn't speak much english, but fortunately I had printed out the name and address of the hotel in Japanese, so I just had to point to it.

We arrived at our hotel at around 8:30PM Japan time, which was 7:30AM Boston time, having not slept very much. Still, we wanted to stay awake until it was time to go to sleep on the correct time zone. We were also hungry, so we needed to get something to eat.

First we dropped our bags off in the room, which was nice and clean though a bit small as you would expect. We asked the front desk for a cheap recommendation. The sent us about a block down the road to a small little restaurant. We sat down and tried to order, but the waiter instructed us that we needed to pay through the odd-looking vending machines in the front of the shop.

Since we clearly didn't know what we were doing, he was kind enough to punch the correct buttons on the machine for us when we pointed to what we wanted on the menu. The food came quite quickly and was really tasty! My stomach was a bit confused to be eating dinner at what it thought was 8:00AM, but it managed.

After that, we wandered around the neighborhood a bit just to get the lay of the land. The hotel, Hotel Gimmond, is on a fairly major road, so there's a lot nearby. We checked out the 7-11 which is across the street, and were pretty amused to find the huge variety of things that they sell. Lots of snacks and ready-to-eat meals, which was interesting.

Finally, we headed back to the hotel exhausted. We had been travelling for about 24 hours, so it was about time to get some sleep.